Part of the problem of being friggin' obsessed with healthcare reform is that I miss things. Like, say, craven editorials by local papers urging investigators to ignore the flagrant violations of human rights by American interrogators.
It's a shame that the state's largest newspaper has taken so soft a stance on torture.
In an editorial on Sept. 4, The Billings Gazette called on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to hold off on investigations of CIA misconduct, at least until he gets a Senate committee report. That's just wrong.
This is not a close call. The United States, like all other civilized nations, is obligated under the International Convention Against Torture, signed by President Reagan in 1988, to fully investigate credible allegations of torture committed by the U.S. government and its agents. We have no legal option under the convention except to investigate.
Remember, as Dave points out, Attorney General Holder is considering prosecution against only those interrogators who violated the already vile torture guidelines set out by the Bush administration. We're talking about interrogators who threatened and beat detainees, sometimes to death. We're talking about real thugs here, criminals, not agents following orders.
And, frankly, that Holder and the White House aren't talking about prosecuting those that came up with the "enhanced interrogation" strategy is our national shame. Since when did Montana editors find it reasonable to torture?
Okay. So it looks like torture was, in fact, mostly used to extract false data to justify the invasion of Iraq. So much for the righties' ticking time bomb theories or all of those Philosophy 101 conundrums about the ends justifying the means, etc & co.
And now, with the cover sheets of Donald Rumseld's reports on Iraq to the White House published, it looks as if somebody thought the Iraq War was a big game, a new religious war, Christians vs. the infidels. And as Kossak LithiumCola noted, the release of these pictures are as likely - if not more likely - to inflame Islamic opinion against our troops than any pictures of torture would, it's pretty obvious the concern about the torture is really just a way to protect the Bush cabal.
So. Can we talk about prosecuting our nation's torturers yet?
ROVE: Taking, for example, the memoranda about the enhanced interrogation techniques and making them public has been a value to our enemy. It has served, frankly, I think, as a recruiting tool. They can now take these memoranda and go to prospective, you know, recruits and say, This is the worst that the enemy, the United States, would ever do to you, and they've even forsworn these things. We can help you, prepare you to deal with these things, but even the enemy is so weak they're not going to use these techniques on you. And it's given them a tool to make it more attractive to recruit people, and you know, this kind of thing is harmful to us over the long haul.
Basically, he's confirming what Andrew Sullivan conjectured, that the Bush administration used torture as a tool to intimidate would-be terrorists, not to extract ticking-bomb information.
I find it strange that Rove et al, think that extreme authoritarian tactics like this will discourage people from opposing the US? I mean, doesn't he realize this kind of sh*t fires people up? Didn't they ever watch "Red Dawn," fer chrissakes?
But then consider the war records of the people who made the decision to torture. Bush - his daddy got him a nice gig in the reserves so he could avoid active duty in Vietnam - and he still went AWOL. Cheney had "other priorities" than enlisting. Rove sought deferment after deferment, and slipped past Vietnam without firing a single shot in anger. And these men supported Vietnam. You'd hate to think what they'd have done to get out of a war they opposed.
And you wonder why they think the treat of physical harm would discourage al Qaeda recruits...
Blogger Alert: I have written a column in defense of Dick Cheney. I know how upsetting this will be to some Cheney critics, and I count myself as one, who think -- in respectful paraphrase of what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman -- that everything he says is a lie, including the ands and the thes. Yet I have to wonder whether what he is saying now is the truth -- i.e., torture works.
In some sense, this is an arcane point since the United States insists it will not torture anymore -- not that, the Bush people quickly add, it ever did. Torture is a moral abomination, and President Obama is right to restate American opposition to it. But where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually work. That they do not is a matter of absolute conviction among those on the political left, who seem to think that the CIA tortured suspected terrorists just for the hell of it.
Nice rhetorical trick there, eh? Call into question a fact by alluding to the "absolute conviction" of liberals, and, wow! Suddenly it's no longer a fact, even if it is supported by tons of evidence! But, folks, torture does not work as an interrogation tool.
Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and human rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured. And the only way they could pull this off is by the total secrecy they constructed and defended. So we had a public government respectful of the rule of law, and a secret government whose main goal was persuading terror suspects that there was no rule of law at all. It is hard to convey just how dangerous this was and is.
That is, if there's anything the Bush administration was obsessed with, it was the projection of power. And didn't the Bush administration use torture to get "evidence" of al Qaeda's link to Iraq? So yeah, Cheney probably does think torture works. But not in the way Cohen means...
Here's an "interesting" tidbit of news from a CIA torture report soon to be declassified:
Government officials familiar with the CIA's early interrogations say the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses is contained in the "top secret" May 7, 2004, inspector general report, based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents. The full report remains closely held, although White House officials have told political allies that they intend to declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month's release of the Justice Department's interrogation memos...
Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that "it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks," according to the Justice Department's declassified summary of it.
And even government officials who were involved claimed that torture provided information, they felt that the same information could have been gathered from regular interrogation techniques.
Which begs the question, why does Dick Cheney stillsupport torture?
The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Here are the results. You'll notice that "white evangelical protestants" are the group most likely to approve of the use of torture.
Now this news should be accompanied by a lecture on the difference between causation and correlation. For one, white evangelical Christians tend to be more conservative, so they're more likely to steep themselves in conservative radio, watch Fox News, and hear little or no opinions against torture. For another, it could be white evangelicals are more culturally primed towards violent retribution -- according to some sociologists (and highlighted in Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers"), the South, where most evangelicals live, is influenced by its cultural legacy of its Scots highland code of honor.
And then, of course, this is just a poll.
Still, you'd think, or hope, regular church goers would know the difference between right and wrong. What's going on here? Hubris from chuchgoers, that their faith someone is too comforting, and discourages introspection and self-questioning?
Not that non-church-goers do much better, either. A full forty percent believe torture's okay? Sheesh.
Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House's illegality.
Is it me, or does this fit a pattern with revelations about the Bush administration and Iraq? Some information leaked out, a few journalists and bloggers followed the trail, shocking revelations came to light...which the media ignored for two to four years until an authorized government report admits to what we knew all along.
Does it bother anyone else that most mainstream media outlets are passive when it comes to challenging the government?
This stuff that's coming out about the Bush administration is huge. The implications about the executive branch are enormous. But...will anything happen? Where's the pressure to right the wrongs that have been committed?
The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
It's pretty widely known that torture gets bad data. This is f*cking low. So we went to war based on "information" we tortured out of terror suspects?
From a New York Times article on the decision to use torture:
"The Communists do not look upon these assaults as 'torture,' " one 1956 study concluded. "But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture."
Worse, the study found that under such abusive treatment, a prisoner became "malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate."
That's a US government report on the interrogation techniques used by Communist China on US prisoners, which produced false confessions.
The Bush administration's program of torture was based on the Chinese techniques.
Sorry for the long silence. I went on a spontaneous trip with the kids who had spring break, to visit my folks. Life happened. I wrote little.
I did manage to catch the local Tea Bagging party in downtown Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There were a couple dozen protesters with the expected anti-tax signs. There were more people at these things than I had expected, tho' still shy, nation-wide, of a single day of anti-war marches in a single day in New York or San Francisco in the days before the invasion of Iraq. I was also surprised at the number of people who appeared to be equally disparaging of the GOP at these things. Yes, there's lots of anger over the bailouts and the government spending, but Obama and the Democrats aren't necessarily the focus of the ire, which probably worried the folks who put on this campaign a little. It's pretty obvious the protests were an attempt by the talk show/Fox News crowd to place themselves firmly at the center of the next wave of Republican politics.
To be fair, I expected to be disappointed by the protesters' arguments, and I was. A whole lot of people were complaining about taxes -- but Obama's budget will give most of 'em a cut. Did they know? Or were they out serving their economic betters' interests?
I am, of course, speechless at the recent revlations of the Bush administration's legal work on behalf of torture and the craven apologists that defended what happened. Andrew Sullivan, who's been decrying the US use of torture for ages, was the man to go to when the memos were released. There's a lot to digest, even though a lot of these techniques were known and the Bush administration's involvement understood. Here's a little something:
The torture techniques were all the more brutal in order to push back against the reputation of the US even in the minds of Qaeda or alleged Qaeda members. What Mukasey and Hayden are arguing for today is a scheme whereby, in secret, the US government credibly allows captives to believe they are in an endless, bottomless pit of extra-legal terror. This is the state of mind they are trying to construct by torture. That's the point of the sensory deprivation, the disappearances, the sequestering from the Red Cross, the endless solitary confinement, the IRFing, the hoods, the nudity, and all the other sadism. It is precisely to persuade the barbarians that we are as bad as they are and have no limits and no qualms in doing to them whatever we want.
Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and human rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured. And the only way they could pull this off is by the total secrecy they constructed and defended. So we had a public government respectful of the rule of law, and a secret government whose main goal was persuading terror suspects that there was no rule of law at all. It is hard to convey just how dangerous this was and is.
Moreover, this was done by the professional classes in this society. It was not done by Lynndie England or some night-shift sadists at Abu Ghraib. According to these documents, almost nothing that was done at Abu Ghraib was outside the limits agreed to by Bush - and much of what was done at Abu Ghraib was mild in comparison. So when the president acted "shocked" at what we all saw, and said it was not America, he was also authorizing far worse in secret - and systematizing it long after Abu Ghraib was over. He was either therefore a fantastic liar on one of the gravest matters imaginable or so psychologically compartmentalized and prone to rigid denial of reality and so unversed in history, law and morality that he had no reason being president.
If you want to know how democracies die, read these memos. Read how gifted professionals in the CIA were able to convince experienced doctors that what they were doing was ethical and legal. Read how American psychologists were able to find justifications for the imposition of psychological torture, and were able to analyze its effects without ever stopping and asking: what on earth are we doing?
Sort of puts the manufactured hysteria over imaginary tax oppression in perspective, doesn't it?
Today's news that a Spanish court is mulling criminal charges against Bush administration lawyers for violating international treaties "by providing the legal framework to justify torture" should remind folks of British lawyer Phillipe Sands' warnings on Fresh Air, that signatories of the treaties banning torture are obligated by law to investigate and prosecute torturers in other countries. And in that interivew, Sands identified LiTW favorite kicking boy, John Yoo, as someone who's in especial danger of prosecution because his opinions supporting torture reek of a lawyer looking to justify an administration policy without regard to law. A big no-no.
John Yoo was named as a person of interest in the Spanish investigation.
It's embarassing, to say the least. Our government's failure to hold former government officials accountible for their reprehnsible and illegal actions is more than just an embarassment, it's dangerous. While the Obama administration appears to have backed off the more egregious policies enacted by the Bush administration, it does so of its own power. In other words, the government has stopped these policies because the president has decided to, not because the people and their representatives demanded that our laws be upheld and those that broke them be held accountible.
In short, the precedent for the unitary executive and its associated powers still exists.
Some time ago, British lawyer Phillippe speculated that Bush administration officials were likely to be investigated for their role in approving the use of torture by the US.
This is what he said about LiTW kicking-boy, John Yoo:
His legal opinions are truly appalling. There's no one I know -- and respect -- who supports them. It appears he was essentially used to rubberstamp a predetermined policy. And that, I think, takes him across a line. It's not just bad lawyering, it's not just unprofessional legal advice, it takes you into the realm of complicity.
And I think if evidence emerges from further investigation that abusive techniques of interregation had already been embarked upon without appropriate legal authorization, and they needed to find someone to sign off on it, and he was the person to sign off on it, then I think it becomes particularly certain.
It turns out the Mukasey DoJ started an internal investigation into Bush lawyers' role in approving torture -- and rumor has it that the findings are grim...for Bushies.
OPR investigators focused on whether the memo's authors deliberately slanted their legal advice to provide the White House with the conclusions it wanted, according to three former Bush lawyers who asked not to be identified discussing an ongoing probe. One of the lawyers said he was stunned to discover how much material the investigators had gathered, including internal e-mails and multiple drafts that allowed OPR to reconstruct how the memos were crafted. In a departure from the norm, Jarrett also told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee last year he would inform them of his findings and would "consider" releasing a public version. If he does, it could be the most revealing public glimpse yet at how some of the major decisions of Bush-era counterterrorism policy were made.
Naturally ex-administration officials are apopelectic. ("'OPR is not competent to judge [the opinions by Justice attorneys]. They're not constitutional scholars,' said [a] former Bush lawyer." Sounds suspiciously like David Addington, doesn't it? Of course, what does he know about the Constitution?)
In any case, just the fact this story appeared in print may mean we'll see the results of the report...and might create more public pressure to investigate and prosecute Bush officials for their role in the illegal government activities of the last eight years.
Obama said his team is still evaluating the whole issue of interrogations and detentions.
"Obviously, we are looking at past practices and I don't believe anyone is above the law," he told ABC in an interview.
"But my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law," he added.
I'm sorry, but if we don't have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years - and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama's remarks to mean that we won't - this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don't face any consequences if they abuse their power.
Now added to the pantheon of "liberal" dogma is the shrill, ideological belief that high government officials must abide by our laws and should be treated like any other citizen when they break them. To believe that now makes you not just a "liberal," but worse: a "liberal score-settler." Apparently, one can attain the glorious status of being a moderate, a centrist, a high-minded independent only if one believes that high political officials (and our most powerful industries, such as the telecoms) should be able to break numerous laws (i.e.: commit felonies), openly admit that they've done so, and then be immunized from all consequences. That's how our ideological spectrum is now defined.
Greenwald goes on to claim, quite rightly I suspect, that probably the main reason Obama -- and more importantly, Congresss -- doesn't want to go there is because they were complicit with Bush's extralegal activities. In short, if they investigate, everyone will be swept up. I suspect the DC Establishment is content with Obama's promised kinder, gentler anti-terror activities, which probably will preclude torture, if Eric Holder's recent testimony during his confirmation hearings is any indication.
Still, it's torture. Those that green-lighted torture, those leaders that approved its use, should be prosecuted to the fullest, whether they were Democrats or Republicans. It's not a matter of "settling scores," it's about holding the guilty accountable, about ensuring that government officials respect the law.
British lawyer Phillipe Sands was on Fresh Air yesterday, claiming that there's likely to be some sort of investigation into "high-ranking government officials and top military figures" over the use of torture during the Bush years. Essentially the pressure to investigate isn't likely to stem from any sense of righteousness on behalf of the Obama administration, but from international pressure. Torture is one of the few crimes -- alongside genocide and war crimes -- that can be prosecuted within any country that's a party to the international agreements to ban torture. In short, if the U.S. government doesn't do something to look into its use of torture, another government probably will. Like, say, Britain. Needless to say, a major international incident between the U.S. and the EU is something the Obama administration wants to avoid, given its public commitment to end our nation's diplomatic isolation in the world community.
Anyhow, it's a great interview and well worth a listen. But here's the part I'd like to quote, about administration lawyer, John Yoo:
I think the author, the principle author, of the infamous torture memo -- that's to say, John Yoo -- must be at serious risk of possible investigation. I mean, he is, in a sense, impressively unapologetic...he sticks by what he has done, I fundamentally disagree with what he has done. But he has said he believes he has done the right thing.
His legal opinions are truly appalling. There's no one I know -- and respect -- who supports them. It appears he was essentially used to rubberstamp a predetermined policy. And that, I think, takes him across a line. It's not just bad lawyering, it's not just unprofessional legal advice, it takes you into the realm of complicity.
And I think if evidence emerges from further investigation that abusive techniques of interregation had already been embarked upon without appropriate legal authorization, and they needed to find someone to sign off on it, and he was the person to sign off on it, then I think it becomes particularly certain.
I have to admit, I've long found John Yoo one of the morecontemptablemembers of the Bush administration, precisely because of his willingness to distort U.S. law and the Constitution into politically convenient opinions. And, yes, administration lawyers have a history of doing so -- Renquist and Scalia greased their path to the SCOTUS by being the legal bag carriers for Nixon. But Yoo subverted the law for torture.
For a while, Yoo furiously penned op-eds defending the administration's incredibly weak legal basis for breaking the law, but recently broke tradition-- after the election of a Democrat to the nation's highest office, coincidentally -- by opining (along with "loyal Bushie" sidekick, John Bolton) that the president should give up power to the Senate on trade matters.
That's right: Yoo's arguing for something less than absolute powers for the executive branch, and by doing so, enters Bill Kristol territory, crassly and ineptly carrying water for the GOP. If there ever was any doubt that Yoo isn't simply a misguided ideologue, it's this op-ed. I'm not sure what he's after -- a consulting gig? an eventual appointment to a federal court by some future, grateful conservative president? a shot at political office? -- but it's weak and infuriating. Let's hope investigations do occur, and Yoo gets swept up with them...
Okay, in all the hubub of the election and Obama's transition and Rick Warren's honored position in the inauguratiobn is forgotten the Bush administration. The reason - let's face it - for the Democratic sweep of Congress and the presidency.
It was bad. In fact, it was just as bad as many of us had feared.
Take Dick Cheney. Last week on the talk show circuit, he defended the belief that the presidency has absolute powers and admitted he authorized the use of torture, in response to which Dahlia Lithwick appropriately quoted John MacKenzie:
MacKenzie shows how a scholarly constitutional claim about the right of executive branch officials to interpret the Constitution morphed into the aggressively ahistorical interpretation of executive power that Cheney parrots with such perfect confidence. As MacKenzie writes: "The unitary executive has come a long way for a theory that has a hole in its heart and no basis in history or coherent thought. It simply is devoid of content, not expressed or even strongly implied in foundational documents such as The Federalist, not to mention the Constitution."
Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.
The Bush administration: just as bad as we said it was.
You know...how many of these stories were shrugged off by traditional media for so long, and are now openly admitted to by the vice president? And what consequences will there be?
I'm betting none.
Honesly, everybody should be enraged by this - conservatives and DC insiders, too. But conservatives are busy coming up with intellectual justifications for the Bushies' actions and the media is busy coming up with reasons why it's a bad idea to punish any of these *sshats, the real reason being that they identify with the Cheneys of the world more than the dirty hippies...ie, the rest of us.
Merry friggin' Christmas.
Speaking of which, I'll be posting lightly for the next few days, because I'm on vacation!
The Justice Department in 2002 told the CIA that its interrogators would be safe from prosecution for violations of anti-torture laws if they believed `in good faith' that harsh techniques used to break the will of prisoners, including waterboarding, would not cause "prolonged mental harm."
As the TPM report notes, this means that administration officials knew they were crossing a legal line, even as DoJers were penning the infamous Torture Memo. Of course, the very existence of the Torture Memo belies that -- why else would you need to write it, if you didn't think torture was illegal? Heck, the Nation's Stephen Gillers posited that the very shoddiness of the legal work found in the Torture Memo shows that its authors "knew what the President wanted and delivered: torture is OK if you call it something else."
You do know that lawyers can be prosecuted for writing opinions in which they give legal justification for actions they know to be illegal, right?
Is the Bush administration really considering pre-emptive pardons? Conservative jurists hope so, wanting Bush to head off any impending investigation of illegal government activities during the Bush years by a future administration.
The money quote:
"The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations," said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. "If we don't protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances."
Sounds a lot like the Nuremberg Defense, eh? Yes, I'm aware of Godwin's Law - but we're talking about a government that was involved in illegal spying, illegal detention, torture, and kidnapping, and that reintroduced pre-emptive war to the world. At this point, we're entering a rarified arena and running out of suitable analogies. Is Pinochet a better comparison? South Africa's Apartheid state? Brezhnev?
And who here thinks the pardons will be for the regular joe spooks and other agents in the trenches? Me, neither. We've seen from the Abu Ghraib fallout how the administration rolls: throw the little guy under the bus while dodging any and all accountability.
The point here, the idea of pre-emptive pardons is odious. I don't want the government to "take chances" with my civil liberties. I want them to stay within the law, and I want accountability for those that don't, regardless of rank or station.
For the Fourth, Ochenski penned a brilliant column comparing Jefferson's complaints against the English King justifying American independence to contemporary infractions wrought by the Bush administration.
I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, "Any time is a long time when you're breathing water." I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
Also of note, Hitchens lists four reasons why we should not waterboard: it's a torture technique we've prosecuted; if we use it, expect it and other torture techniques to be commonly used against our own people; the information extracted by its use is "junk"; it justification leads to other, worse, torture techniques.
(Which may explain why a number of civilian and military leaders are calling for a ban on torture. Those among the protesters include George Schultz and Richard Armitage.)
This is a pretty significant change of heart for Hitchens, who earlier claimed waterboarding was not torture.
And then there was this report by the New York Times' Scott Shane that revealed the military prepared a class on "coercive management techniques" for prisoners at Guantanamo based on Communist Chinese techniques used on US servicemen in the Korean War to extract filmed "confessions" to wartime atrocities. (And which inspired the Manchurian Candidate.)
The techniques were lifted from a 1957 Air Force study intended to prepare US military members for why they might expect at the hands of our enemies.
So Reagan's alleged heir came to follow the moral strictures of Communist totalitarians. And note: the torture methods were designed to elicit false confessions. We have no assurance that the intelligence conjured up by this brutality is anything more than what Dick Cheney wanted it to be. (That's how he likes his intelligence, of course. Whatever he wants reality to be.)
It's interesting that many Bush-backers don't either see the irony that we've appropriated some of the worst from Communist regimes, or don't care. If it's the latter - and I'm assuming these conservatives were also virulent anti-Communists - it makes one wonder what it was, exactly, about the Communist dictatorships they didn't like?
